This girl should have been kicked out of the game and needs to spend time with a sports shrink at her school. She is an embarrassment to sport and to women athletics and its insane they let her stay in the game. I work in professional athletics with some of the top athletes in the world. If any of them – men or women – conducted themselves like this in a game or at an Olympic level – it would jeapordize their entire career – with sponsors, fans, teammates.

Sometimes the best way to learn a lesson is to be made an example of so others learn not to follow suit. If her antics continue again, she should be made a spectacle of by the media and kicked off the team.

Being “rough” on the field is one thing. Her behavior was maliciaous, deliberate brutality and on more than one occassion. Where was her coach in all this?

I’m going to take it many steps farther than you Melissa. They don’t just sometimes lose their tempers. I’m going to say they almost always lose their tempers. Why wouldn’t they? You are actively nursing all that aggression in you. I would argue that if you are not sufficiently fomenting a bit, then you are not playing well. That’s the nature of sports. And that is why you’re playing them, because you’re learning both to nurse that energy, but to also control it. So should she be suspended? of course she should! But I so do understand how that can get out of hand. It’s funny because the more outrageous thing to me was that the other woman didn’t get to her feet and knock that girl out! But not only is that unsportsmanlike, and you have to train yourself to keep it in the game, but as those things go, the refs never see the dirty hit, they usually see the retaliation. This didn’t seem too far off from what we did in high school, and that was h.s., and not college, and definitely not in a division that was at the height of competitiveness.

I mean issues? Why does any of this get more than a wow, that sucks, when we tolerate – even celebrate aggression in sports on a daily basis. This is what angered me about the Serena brouha; I had some spirited discussions with friends about it. We see men in sports do far worse. I’d say hockey alone, and that seems standard fare! :p But football players used to pull face masks until it was penalized because of the danger. Or what about sans-protective gear boxing? When we see serious aggression in sports, it has to be considerable before we get this kind of talk, and then they can still move on to potentially have careers in which they don’t lapse into that behavior.

I agree this is also a great opportunity to talk about this, but not just for parents and kids, for us in general to try to let go of the double standards that are still seething under society. This literally just happened in a Steelers game. A player yanked the hair of another (who is known for having long hair). And what happened? He received a penalty, and it was a highlight in the sportsnews reel, and that was it. Not completely identical, but see for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVO93amUv7Y

If people are really in an uproar, then I think it has to be because people are still holding on to antiquated notions of what women should be like, and this challenges it.

But the blog you referenced doesn’t help this conversation. While the writer may be dead on about a lot of things, she seems to shoe-horn this incident to prove it. I mean have guys actually said it was hot? And if so, in what context? Just like many women can like guys who mirror more stereotypically feminine traits, then it seems natural that men can like gals who do the same. If they think it’s hot, it could be the cat-fight thing, or it could be that they appreciate a more physically aggressive woman. And if it’s the latter, that’s not a bad thing. Without more info, it’s just not as black and white as the blogger makes it seem.

Even more outrageous than that, is the response that such a behavior is “hot.” Womensportsblog hit it right on the head (I leave it up to readers to decide if this is a pun) when she said
“It’s about using women as a kind of theater which exists only to titillate men.”

Sometimes I feel that we haven’t made any progress at all.